Fashion brand Gina Tricot uses 360° technology to drive engagement

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Fashion brand Gina Tricot uses 360° technology to drive engagement

January 2016

Gina Tricot is a Swedish fashion chain with over 180 stores and a growing e-commerce site. For their latest campaign, a collaboration with fashion-savvy music duo Say Lou Lou, they wanted to create an interactive experience that would appeal to consumers whose heavy online content consumption makes them increasingly hard to impress. To bring this unique exercise in brand-storytelling to life, they turned to YouTube, launching their Say Blue campaign with the Nordics’ first 360° TrueView video ad.

THE GOALS

Drive traffic to stores and online

Engage hard-to-reach target group by providing content they are passionate about

360° music video views on YouTube added up to a combined total of 2 yrs watch time

Video creative achieved view through rates of 30%

Acknowledging Customer Power

The campaign’s main purpose was to drive traffic to the brand’s stores and website, but with a fashion-conscious and tech-savvy customer base, Gina Tricot realised that traditional marketing approaches might not be enough. “What’s changing in the retail industry is customer power,” explained Magnus Johansson, Marketing Director of Gina Tricot. “We’ve moved from push to pull communications, and we need to engage our customers more than just talk to them.” By mixing fashion, music and cutting-edge technology, the Say Blue campaign helped Gina Tricot to stand out in the crowded online content space.

A Right Here, Right Now Campaign

“We know that our customers are real-timers, and extremely social,” added Magnus, “and we needed to serve them an interesting and compelling story in all channels possible.” To do this, Gina Tricot worked with agencies DDB, HowCom and Keybroker to build out a complex campaign that enabled sequential storytelling across devices. Running Say Blue on YouTube, where their customers were already consuming a lot of content, meant that the campaign could also “address our target group on their own terms,” explained Stefan Zetterberg of Howcom, “which feels very relevant in 2015.”

In addition to the 360° Music Video, standard-format backstage footage and other videos were shot to create a truly immersive experience for the viewer, while campaign budgets were adjusted on the fly as garment inventory levels fluctuated. Targeted PR and Social Media activity pre- and mid-campaign was also used to build and maintain momentum.

The Success of Say Blue

When reviewing the results of this campaign, it became clear that the investment in innovative, original content had really paid off. Building the campaign around new technology created a buzz that extended beyond the target group to a far wider demographic, achieving healthy rates of ad recall, and creating a substantial uplift in search interest in the brand’s keywords.

The sequential storytelling set-up of Say Blue also led to a view rate for the 3.5 minute video that was the same as for a shorter 30 second ad, and in total, view time of the 360° creative among their hard-to-reach target audience added up to more than two years of engagement with the brand.

Reflecting on the outcome of this innovative marriage between fashion, music and technology, Gina Tricot’s Magnus Johansson concluded that the experiment had been a success: “By having a stronger digital focus in our new media strategy, we managed to reach more than 90% of our target group!”